They bounced off down the dirt road and turned south onto a different road running high above the eastern side of a fast mountain stream. More turns, winding around a low mountain, then left up a smaller road. The driver slammed to a stop in front of a house with tin patches on the sides and roof. “Sudhana, there—” He pointed. “Cigarettes?”
Michael gave them each an American cigarette, which was something of a luxury in these parts. Both lit up immediately, and Michael walked on unsteady legs toward the house. The old doubts? Was this the place? Was he doing the right thing? Jellie, don’t turn me away, don’t do that. Whatever is going on, let me be part of it.
The forehead and eyes of a crone appeared over a windowsill, then disappeared immediately when she saw the good-size white man walking toward her. “Sudhana?” Michael called out. Nothing. “Jellie? Jel-lie, it’s Michael.” Still nothing. Then slowly the door opened a crack, and the old woman looked out. She spoke rapidly in words he didn’t understand. “Jellie… JahLAY. Jellie… JahLAY.” He said her name over and over again, then added the surname he had been told she might be using, and the words were strange on his tongue. “Jellie Velayudum. JahLAY Velayudum.”
The woman shook her head, spoke rapidly in a croaking voice, and pointed in a direction that looked as if it were inside the house. Christ, had something happened or what? Was Jellie lying in there?
The driver swaggered over to where Michael was trying to climb the wall between cultures. “Cigarette, boss? I know what old woman is saying.” More baksheesh. You get a little tired of it after a while. It’s not the money or the smokes, it’s the bloody damned arrogance, the use of leverage.
Michael gave him half a pack of Merits. “She say woman called JahLAY Velayudum is at old hunting lodge in the middle of the lake, place called Lake Palace Hotel. You want go there?”
Michael nodded, and the driver flipped his head toward the jeep. They went down around the mountain and got on the road along the river again. Seven minutes later the jeep came over a rise, and Lake Periyar looked blue and calm in the distance.
The jeep driver dropped Michael off at the Aranya Nivas Hotel, a hundred yards from the lake-shore. He asked for more cigarettes, and Michael told him to stuff it. Michael Tillman was tired of smart young bastards, whatever country they come from, and said as much. He’d been too passive, too intent on finding Jellie, putting up with too much nonsense. The driver retreated in the face of Michael’s anger, shrugged his shoulders, and backed his jeep out of the hotel driveway.
Michael went inside, grubby and tired. The woman at the desk was perfectly done, turquoise sari and a face that would launch a thousand Porsches back in the States. She was polite and efficient, and he was ready for some of that. He asked about the Lake Palace Hotel. She told him it was an old maharajah’s hunting lodge with only six guest rooms and that reservations were handled here at the Aranya Nivas. While she flipped through a reservations book, Michael stared at a photograph on the wall behind her. It was slightly faded, but still a beautiful shot of a tiger coming out of tall grass on a foggy morning and carried the signature Robert Kincaid.
The clerk said there were rooms available for the next four nights. After that it was completely booked for a week. Three continental meals each day were included in the price.
The big question. He asked it: “I’m supposed to meet a woman at the Lake Palace. I wonder if she has checked in yet. Her first name is Jellie… JahLAY. I believe she is registered under the name Velayudum, though she might be using Markham or Braden.” It all sounded rather suspicious, vaguely clandestine, but he had decided to cover all the bases.
“Three of the rooms are currently occupied out there.” She looked up at him. “And you say you are to meet someone?”
“Yes. My arrival date, however, was uncertain.”
“I have a Velayudum listed here. There are two people registered under that name.”
Michael staggered inside himself. All the months, all the miles, the dreams. Forty-three, and he was standing there looking stupid while Jellie was registered under an Indian name and sharing the room with someone, most likely a man named Velayudum from somewhere back in her India days. Jellie—all the things I don’t know about you.
Michael would always remember how alone he felt at that moment, incredibly alone and lonely and discarded. It must have shown, because the woman asked, “Sir, would you still like a room at the Lake Palace?”
He could go back to Madurai, fly to Madras, and change his homeward flight. Then he thought, This is foolish male vanity you’re suffering, Tillman. You’re not thinking clearly, afraid of what you might find in the middle of the lake. You’re not going anywhere except out to that hotel and hit the end of this at full speed, if that’s what it comes to.
“Put me down for one night, please. The hotel is on an island, is that correct?”
“Yes, we call it an island. There is a narrow strip of swamp connecting it to the mainland. It’s approximately a twenty-minute boat ride from the jetty.”
“What boat, what jetty?”
“Go out the front door, turn right, and walk down the path. You’ll see a small building with a sign reading ‘Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary.’ Purchase your boat ticket there. The ticket agent will direct you to the proper boat. The island is in one of India’s largest tiger preserves, and since you will be staying there you must also purchase an entrance permit to the preserve. If you want to take a safari into the jungle, you can make arrangements for a guide at the same time you purchase your boat ticket. Without a guide, you will not be allowed to leave the hotel grounds, since there are large animals about and it is much too dangerous.”
As Michael turned to leave he asked, “Was the photograph behind you taken here?”
“Yes, on the island where the Lake Palace is located. I’m told the photographer who took it came here often some years ago and always stayed at the Lake Palace.”
Down the path to the sanctuary office. Hundreds of Indian tourists milling around on the jetty below and several old excursion boats rocking in the water. Michael handed the room voucher to a wildlife officer at the office. He issued a boat ticket, saying Michael should show his hotel voucher to the pilot of the Miss Lake Periyar. The pilot would then drop him off at the hotel.
It was a mess. Travel was never easy in India, and this was something altogether different. There were three excursion boats, two of them in the process of loading, one already packed with Indian tourists. Two hundred future boat passengers, porters, and assorted hangers-on were packed on the jetty. The loaded boat had Miss Lake Periyar painted on its starboard side.
He fought his way through the crowd, got on the boat, and showed one of the hands the hotel voucher. The man seemed disinterested but nodded and indicated with a toss of his head that Michael should find a seat. The dominant feeling permeating all travel in India was one of ambiguity, and Michael had serious doubts as to whether the pilot would be notified he was to be dropped at the hotel.
The boat was constructed with two levels, a glassed-in first level and an open upper deck. There were no seats left, but there was shouting and laughter and calls to those left on the jetty, the sum of which was pandemonium. Children ran up and down the steps between the first and second levels, people got off the boat to talk to those left behind, then got back on again.
The boathand Michael had talked to was making a reasonable attempt at crowd control but was failing miserably, overwhelmed by the crush. How, Michael wondered, could any animals be spotted along the shore, if that indeed was the main thrust of the boat tour. The boat would sound like pharaoh’s army coming over the water toward them.
The boathand got tough when the engine turned over. He ordered people to sit down and stay seated. Michael checked again, but every seat on the boat was filled, so he hunkered down on the steps leading to the upper deck with a young boy sitting on the step just below his feet. The boy twisted his neck and looked at him while Michael stared out over the water.<
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The boat moved away from the jetty and chugged slowly down the huge, narrow lake, a reservoir stretching for miles behind the Periyar Dam, constructed by the British in 1895. A narration came from small loudspeakers mounted at various places on the boat, sometimes in English, sometimes in one of the Indian languages, telling the passengers they might see various animals ranging from leopards to tigers to elephants to wild pigs. Michael figured if they saw any animals at all, they’d be flopped down in laughter at the strange mammals packed onto an old green contraption that should’ve sunk twenty years ago.
Late afternoon now, sun dropping. Michael’s boat and the two eventually following were the last sight-seeing runs of the day. Heavy jungle along the shore except for fifty feet or so of bare dirt running down to the water in some places. Michael stood up for a moment and could see a high hill with trees, looking as though it sat hard and straight in the boat’s course.
Ten minutes later the boathand shook Michael’s knee and said, “Lake Palace.” Michael was tight, so tight his breath was coming in short little intakes and exhales, as if he were finishing a long sprint, which he was. Across the sunlit water of India on a December afternoon Michael Tillman went, fearful, terribly so, of what he was going to find ahead of him.
A wooden jetty stuck out fifteen feet from the island’s shore, and he could see wide stone steps behind the jetty leading up into heavy forest. A long red tile roof was visible through breaks in the foliage. On the jetty was an Indian boy of about fifteen. The desk clerk at the Aranya Nivas had radioed the lodge to say a guest was on the Miss Lake Periyar.
The pilot expertly swung the boat broadside to the jetty’s end, and Michael jumped off. The boy pointed at the knapsack on Michael’s shoulder, and Michael gave it to him. They began the long climb up the stone steps to the lodge, which sat a hundred and fifty feet above them. Halfway up Michael touched the boy’s shoulder, signaling he wanted to stop for a moment.
He sat on a wooden bench beside the steps, put his head in his hands, and thought, imagining what he might see at the top of the steps and thinking about how he would handle whatever was there. The boy stood patiently, looking off into the jungle.
After a minute or two, Michael got up and they continued. At the top of the stairs he followed the boy over a red dirt area where the jungle had been cut back around the entire circumference of the lodge. Off to Michael’s right an Indian couple sat on the veranda in front of their room. They were drinking tea but paused to watch the new arrival come across the dirt and onto the veranda south of them. The manager appeared with a room key, looked Michael over, and said dinner would be served at seven, adding informal dress was appropriate. He asked if he could get Michael something to drink. Michael ordered two Kingfisher beers and followed the boy along the veranda.
The room was spacious with a double bed and a bath area in a separate room to the rear, furniture of slightly battered white wicker. Two large windows with heavy wooden shutters that were closed faced the veranda, and an overhead fan turned slowly. A smaller window in the bath area also had the same heavy shutters. The boy put Michael’s knapsack on one of the beds and scurried around, turning on lights. Michael tipped him, and he was gone, closing the door behind him.
Michael looked at his watch. Three hours before dinner. He showered and dressed in a clean khaki shirt and jeans, traded his boots for sandals, drinking Kingfisher and preparing himself for what was to come. He was ready, if there was any real way to be ready for what he was sure he’d discover. No excuse to lounge around in the room, so he walked outside on the cement veranda, which was empty of people along the entire run of the lodge.
A trench, about five feet deep and three feet wide, circled the lodge out beyond the open dirt area where the jungle began. Michael was pretty sure the trench was designed to hold at bay unreliable things snarling along on short legs or crawling on scaled bellies, tongues flickering.
The Indian couple he’d seen earlier were standing near their room at the far end of the lodge. They were on the crest of a hill dropping off to the lake and were looking through binoculars at something across the water on the opposite shore. They called the boy over and asked him a question. “Wild pigs,” he said.
Purple-blue flowers curled from the roof. Far down the lake Michael heard a sound. It took him a moment to recognize it: elephant. In the distance he could hear the low beating of an excursion boat’s engine. He sat there on the south end of a veranda in south India, lit a cigarette, and started on his second beer, feeling like a warrior about to enter battle.
Behind him and north along the veranda he heard a door open and the sound of voices, one of them Jellie’s, he thought. Adrenaline hit Michael Tillman’s arteries in a surge faster and stronger than anything he’d experienced in his basketball days or, for that matter, ever before in any circumstance. The warrior had come to fight for his woman, his body was preparing itself.
Now was the moment. Now—do it, Tillman. Do it and get it over with, settle your affairs, here in the jungle. Where else have men ever settled their affairs? He turned and saw a young Indian woman, fifteen or sixteen years, come out of an open doorway. Her black shining hair was in a long braid, and she had on a sari of a deep orange color, bracelets on her arms and around one ankle, silver toe rings, and straw-colored sandals.
Jellie Markham/Braden/Velayudum, or whoever she was on that day, came out of the same doorway and looked across the stretch of open dirt toward the jungle. “It’s a beautiful evening, Jaya,” Michael heard her say.
The young woman answered her, “Yes, it is. This is the loveliest place I’ve ever seen. The mountain air is so clean and cool after the lowland heat. I’ve always looked forward to our time here.”
Jellie looked down the veranda, gray eyes taking in the scenery, casually glancing at a man sitting by himself at a table. The young woman started to speak but saw Jellie’s face and followed her eyes. They both stared for a moment, then the young woman looked again at Jellie’s face, but Jellie never took her eyes off Michael Tillman. He waited for a man named Velayudum to come out of the doorway and put his arm around Jellie, but no one came.
Jellie was frozen where she stood. Michael looked back at her. She wore the traditional Indian woman’s outfit called a salwar kameese—long tunic and loose, flowing bottoms gathering themselves just above her white sandals, all of it done in the palest of lavenders. She had a red scarf draped around her neck with the ends of it hanging over her shoulders and down her back. And, like the young woman, she wore an ankle bracelet and toe rings. Her hair shone in the half-light on the veranda, and hung straight and long, parted off to one side, just as she wore it back in Cedar Bend, sometimes tucking it up under a tweed cap.
Cedar Bend? Where in the hell was that? Did it exist anymore, or had it ever existed? Maybe… maybe somewhere in another time, somewhere back down along the crinkled chain of living and loving and working, it had once existed. Back in the same, forgotten, and ancient world as Custer, South Dakota, where a boy worked late in the night shooting baskets and repairing an old English motorcycle that would take him over the roads of his life, eventually with a woman named Jellie riding behind him.
Jellie took the girl’s hand and came toward him. He stood up, saying nothing, watching her eyes, which never left his. She let go of the girl’s hand, put her arms around his waist, and laid her head against his chest. He touched her hair. She lifted her face and kissed him.
She turned to the girl. “Jaya, this is Michael Till-man, the man I’ve been telling you about.” Her eyes on Michael’s face again, steady eyes. “Michael, this is my daughter, Jaya Velayudum.”
Twelve
Dhiren Velayudum: revolutionary, member of a radical separatist group that fought everyone and everything connected with the central Indian government. And Jellie Markham, young and idealistic back in the middle sixties, young and idealistic and off to India to write her thesis. Movie stuff: Tamil warrior-poet meets young American woman with her own d
reams of how things ought to be. At bottom, Dhiren Velayudum was a terrorist, and Jellie became his lover and confidante. Though it didn’t seem like terrorism in their nights of loving and days filled with quixotic visions of a great revolutionary flow that could not be halted. She married Dhiren in a traditional Indian ceremony. The shrieking death-dance of her parents when they found out could be heard all the way from Syracuse.
Things went bad for the radicals, and there were wild months of running with Dhiren, hiding in villages and cities. Then came an afternoon road winding high into the Western Ghats, the same road Michael would travel one day years later. The car in which Dhiren and Jellie were riding moved slowly around hairpin curves.
Suddenly Dhiren was pushing Jellie, shouting for her to get out of the car and hide. She got out, carrying Jaya, and crouched behind a jumble of deadfall. Dhiren pitched from the other side of the car and ran for the trees on the opposite side of the road, nine-millimeter, Russian-made pistol in his hand. The sound of automatic weapons. Bullets spitting into the dust like an animal with a hundred claws tracking him and closing fast, then crawling up and across his body. Dhiren spinning, stumbling into the forest.
That night at the Lake Palace Hotel, Jellie and Michael sat on the veranda for two hours after Jaya went to bed. She told the story, all of it, leaving out nothing. How she felt about Dhiren, her memories of him. How she carried her baby along the night roads of south India after Dhiren had been shot, walking all night into Thekkady, where there were sympathizers with the radicals’ cause. How the India government punished her by refusing to issue an exit visa for Jaya so Jellie could take her to the States.
Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend Page 13